Kate Bulkley, Media Analyst.

Will RDF's Comedy Demon website stand out in a crowded market?

By Kate Bulkley

Broadcast News

For Broadcast July 30, 2008

Laughter is often considered the best medicine, and RDF Media hopes that its new comedy website - Comedy Demon - can cure some of the ills involved in making money with online content.

Comedydemon.com launched earlier this month with RDF's Banzai (but oddly not Comedy Unit programmes) plus a bunch of material from other indies including Talkback Thames, Hat Trick and Tiger Aspect. A new deal with BBC Worldwide (see story page 5) is a shot in the arm, delivering programmes including The Catherine Tate Show and boosting the website's content to more than 1,000 episodes of paid-for programmes and about 2,000 ad-supported clips.

RDF is keen to describe the new site as a "new road to market" for content owners in the digital world. The indie sees Comedy Demon as a way to stretch RDF Rights (its distribution arm) into the online world, at least as far as comedy shows are concerned.

If everything goes to plan, the ad-supported and download-to-own site will have 1 million users by year two, which will go some way toward offsetting the start-up costs - my informed guess is that RDF has put about Ł1m into the site and attendant marketing and promotion (it is running adverts on UKTV's Dave, for example). The hope is to make the site stand out in a crowded marketplace and get it a few steps ahead of the launch of the BBC-ITV-Channel 4-backed Kangaroo.

The delay to Kangaroo (now facing a Competition Commission review) has got to be a good thing for Comedy Demon. Not only does RDF have more time to establish it, but the CC is clearly going to be interested in healthy competition for Kangaroo, which could help pave the way for additional programmes being made available to Comedy Demon.

If this works, RDF could look at other genre sites - fashion, kids, property, even cars. Building a consumer-facing brand is a new trick for RDF, but clearly it hopes to have the last laugh.

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